this present century may be accounted a fortunate man. On the one hand
was the vast field of the universe, undivided, unallotted; on the other,
a public eager for instruction. At the present day, when men go to and
fro, and knowledge is increased, we find it hard to realize the
isolation of England until after the close of the great war, or the fear
of invasion that absorbed men’s thoughts until after Trafalgar. That
fear removed, the modern development of the nation began. The number of
those who resorted to the Universities increased by leaps and bounds.
Public school life, as we understand it, was developed. As a natural
consequence, the flower of the English youth were no longer content with
the knowledge that had satisfied their fathers and grandfathers. The old
paths were too narrow for them. The convulsions which had shaken the
continent had not been without their effect even here; and when Europe
was again open, account had to be taken of the work of continental
thinkers. Their achievements must be mastered, continued, developed. It
was allowed on all hands, except by that small class who can neither
learn nor forget, that the time for a new departure in scientific
education had arrived. It was the good fortune of Richard Owen to be
ready just when he was wanted, to take occasion by the hand, and to
become the leader in biological research.
How did he effect this? How did a young man, launched on the great world
of London with no powerful connexions,
‘Break his birth’s invidious bar,
And grasp the skirts of happy chance,
And breast the blows of circumstance
And grapple with his evil star?’
To take a metaphor from our representative system, Owen was the member
for biological science in the parliament of letters for nearly half a
century. And yet he was not a great thinker; his name is not associated
with any far-reaching generalization, or any theory fruitful of wide
results. As a comparative anatomist, and as a paleontologist, he did
plenty of good and solid work. But these pursuits are most commonly
those of a recluse. The man who engages in them must be content, as a
general rule, with the four walls of his laboratory, and the applause of
a small circle of experts. Not so Professor Owen, as he was most
commonly designated, even after he had received knighthood. He contrived
to lead an essentially public life; to be seen everywhere; to have his
last paper talked about in fashionable drawing-rooms quite as much as in
learned societies. How did he effect this? We think that the answer to
our question is to be found—first, in the general eagerness for
scientific instruction which was one of the characteristics of the age
in which he lived; and, secondly, in his own many-sidedness. He was by
no means one of those authors ‘who are all author,’ against whom Byron
launched some of his most brilliant sarcasms. He was a man of science;
but he was also a polished gentleman of varied accomplishments.
It is to be regretted that such a man has not found a biographer more
competent than his grandson and namesake; but the reader who reaches the
end of the second volume will be rewarded by a masterly essay by Mr
Huxley on Owen’s place in science. This is a remarkable composition; not
merely for what it says, but for what it does not say; and we recommend
those who would understand it thoroughly, not merely to read it more
than once, but to cultivate the useful art of reading between the lines.
Of a very different nature to _The Life of Owen_ is the article which
Sir W. H. Flower has contributed to the _Dictionary of National
Biography_. It is of necessity much compressed, but it contains all that
is really essential for the proper comprehension of Owen’s scientific
career, and praise and blame are meted out with calm impartiality. For
ourselves, we have a sincere admiration for Owen, but an admiration
which does not exclude a readiness to admit that he had defects. In what
we are about to say we do not propose to draw a fancy portrait. If we
nothing extenuate, we shall set down naught in malice. In a word, we
shall try to present him as he was, not as he might have been.
* * * * *
Richard Owen was born at Lancaster, 20 July, 1804. His father was a West
India merchant; his mother, Catherine Parrin, was descended from a
French Huguenot family. She is said to have been a woman of refinement
and intelligence, with great skill in music, a talent which she
transmitted to her son. In appearance she was handsome and
Spanish-looking, with dark eyes and hair. Owen delighted to dwell on his
mother’s charm of manner, and all that he owed to her early training and
example. We can well believe this, and the Life is full of touching
references to her solicitude for her darling son. The interest she felt
in all that he did even led her to read through his scientific papers
and his catalogue of the Hunterian collection, with what profit to
herself we are not informed. Her husband died in 1809; but the family
seem to have been left in fairly affluent circumstances, and continued
to live, as before, at Lancaster. Owen’s education began at the
grammar-school there in 1810, when he was six years old, and ended in
1820, when he was apprenticed to a local surgeon. Of his schooldays but
little record has been preserved. One of the masters described him as
lazy and impudent; he is said to have had no fondness for study of any
kind except heraldry; and his sister used to relate that as a boy he was
‘very small and slight, and exceedingly mischievous.’
Those who value the records of boyhood for the sake of traces of the
tastes which made the man celebrated, will be rewarded by the perusal of
the pages which record Owen’s four years as a surgeon’s apprentice at
Lancaster. Not only will they find that he worked diligently at the
curative side of his profession, but that, his master being surgeon to
the gaol, he had the opportunity of attending post-mortem examinations,
and so laid the foundation of his knowledge of the structure of the
human frame. Here too we catch a glimpse of the future comparative
anatomist; but the story of ‘The Negro’s Head,’ here given in the words
used by Owen when he told it himself, is unfortunately too long for
quotation, and is certainly far too good to be spoilt by abbreviation.
In October 1824 Owen matriculated at the University of Edinburgh. There,
in addition to the courses that were obligatory, he attended the
‘outside’ lectures in comparative anatomy delivered by Dr John Barclay.
From these he derived the greatest benefit, and used in after-years to
speak of Barclay with affectionate regard, as ‘my revered preceptor.’ It
is noteworthy that, while at Edinburgh, Owen and one of his friends
founded a students’ society, which at his suggestion was called, by a
sort of prophetic instinct, the Hunterian Society. Barclay must have
decided very quickly that he had to do with no common pupil, for at the
end of April 1825, when Owen had been barely six months in Edinburgh, he
advised him to move to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and study
under Dr. Abernethy, then near the close of his brilliant but eccentric
career. Armed with a letter of introduction from Barclay, Owen set out
for London, where he had ‘literally not one single friend.’ No wonder
that he felt ‘an indescribable sense of desolation’ as he walked up
Holborn, and that ‘the number of strange faces that kept passing by
increased that feeling.’ What happened next is very characteristic of
the strange mixture of roughness and kindness which was natural to his
new patron.
‘Abernethy had just finished lecturing, and was evidently in anything
but the best of tempers, being surrounded by a small crowd of students
waiting about to ask him questions. Owen was just screwing up his
courage to attack this formidable personage and state his business, when
Abernethy suddenly turned upon him and said: “And what do you want?”
After presenting the letter Abernethy glanced at it for a moment,
stuffed it into his pocket, and vouchsafed the gracious reply of “Oh!”
As this did not seem to point to anything very definite, Owen was
turning to go, when Abernethy called after him: “Here; come to breakfast
to-morrow morning at eight,” and presenting him with his card, added,
“That’s my address.” What were the terms in which Dr Barclay had spoken
of him Owen never knew, but he thought they must have been favourable,
for when he presented himself next morning at Abernethy’s residence, and
was anticipating anything but an agreeable _tête-à-tête_ with the great
doctor, he found him, to his surprise, considerably smoothed down and
quite pleasant in his manner. The result of the meeting was that
Abernethy offered him the post of prosector for his lectures’ (i. 30).
A year later (August 18, 1826) Owen obtained the membership of the
College of Surgeons, and set up as a medical practitioner in Carey
Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he gradually obtained a small
practice among lawyers.
We have no wish to underrate Owen’s brilliant talents, or his
perseverance, or his power of sustained work with a definite end in
view; but at the same time it would be absurd to deny that he had
good-fortune to thank for a large part of his first successes. What else
made Abernethy, at their first interview, give him just the appointment
best calculated to bring his peculiar gifts into the light of day? What
else made the same patron procure his appointment, two years later, as
assistant-conservator of the Hunterian collections, out of which all his
future celebrity was developed? He might have been ‘exceedingly well
informed in all that relates to his profession, an excellent anatomist,
and sober and sedate very far beyond any young man I ever knew,’ as one
who was in a position to know said of him in 1830, and yet have ‘bloomed
unseen,’ an obscure practitioner in ‘the dusky purlieus of the law,’ had
not the fickle goddess selected him as the special recipient of her
favours.
Owen’s active life in London divides itself naturally into two periods,
each containing nearly thirty years. The first, during which he was
connected with the Royal College of Surgeons, extended from 1827 to
1856; the second, during which he was nominally superintendent of the
biological side of the British Museum, from 1856 to 1883.
Those who would rightly understand his work during the former period
must of necessity take into account the history and extent of the vast
collection which he was expected to catalogue and to develop, for it
dominated and directed all his studies. It was formed by the celebrated
surgeon, John Hunter, between 1763 and 1793, in which year he died. In
studying it, one is at a loss what to admire most—the beauty of the
specimens themselves, and the admirable clearness with which those
preserved in spirit have been dissected and mounted; or the labour and
self-denial which brought them together in the midst of the incessant
occupations of a large practice; or the almost prophetic instinct which
divined what posterity would require in the way of such aids to study.
It was Hunter’s object to illustrate the phenomena of life in all
organisms, whether in health or in disease. For this purpose he
collected as widely as he could. There is an osteological series, and a
physiological series (in spirit), which exhibits the different organs,
digestive, circulatory, and the like, in order, and traces their
development from the simplest to the most complicated form. To the
Invertebrata he had devoted special attention. He had secured, through
his friend Sir Joseph Banks, many of the treasures collected during
Cook’s voyages; and he had purchased rarities as occasion offered. Of
insects he had a large collection. Nor were his observations limited to
the animal kingdom. Whenever any physiological process could be
illustrated by vegetable life, vegetables were pressed into the service.
Nor did he fail to recognize the truth—which some persons still refuse
to accept—that the remains of extinct animals are only in their proper
place when side by side with those still living on the earth. ‘His
collection of fossils,’ says Owen in one of his prefaces, ‘was the
largest and most select of any in this country.’
To contain this collection Hunter had built a special museum in Castle
Street, Leicester Square, which was open to public inspection on certain
days. After his death his executors, in accordance with his will,
offered the collection to the Government. ‘Buy preparations?’ exclaimed
Mr Pitt; ‘why, I have not money enough for gunpowder!’ Ultimately,
however, the House of Commons agreed to give £15,000 for it, just
one-fifth of the sum that Hunter is said to have spent upon it. Next
arose the further question, who should take care of it. The Royal
Society, it is said, did not consider it ‘an object of importance to the
general study of natural history’; the British Museum was literary, not
scientific; and finally, in 1799, the Corporation of Surgeons, as it was
then called, accepted it, under the condition that a proper catalogue
should be made, a conservator appointed, and twenty-four lectures in
explanation of it delivered annually in the college. Soon afterwards the
Corporation of Surgeons became the Royal College of Surgeons, and a
building, to which Parliament contributed £27,500, was built for its
reception. This was opened in 1813.
When Owen was appointed assistant-conservator of these collections
thirty-four years had elapsed since Hunter’s death. During that time
they had been preserved from damage by the devoted care of Mr William
Clift, who, after being Hunter’s assistant for a short time, had been
appointed conservator, first by the executors, and subsequently by the
college. The general arrangement had been prescribed by Hunter, but no
descriptive catalogue existed, as it had been, unfortunately, Hunter’s
habit to trust to his memory for the history of his specimens. Further,
though lists, more or less imperfect, drawn up either by Hunter himself
or under his direction, had been preserved, the bulk of his papers had
been destroyed by Sir Everard Home, his brother-in-law and executor.
‘There is but one thing more to be done—to destroy the collection,’ was
Clift’s remark when he heard of this act of cynical wickedness. In the
scarcity, therefore, of documentary evidence, other expedients had to be
resorted to for the identification of the specimens which Hunter had
dissected, or had preserved entire in spirit. As Owen remarks in the
preface to the first volume of his descriptive catalogue (published in
1833), ‘It was necessary to consult the book of Nature.’ At first it was
no easy matter to procure the animals required; but after the
establishment of the Zoological Society this difficulty was in a great
measure removed, and more than two hundred dissections were made by Owen
in the course of the work incident to the preparation of the first
volume of the catalogue.
This sketch of the Hunterian collections, which we would gladly have
worked out in greater detail had our space allowed us to do so, will
perhaps be sufficient to indicate to our readers the nature of the field
of research on which Owen was about to enter. It was, in fact, an
undiscovered country, of which he was to be the pioneer. One would like
to know whether he had any idea of what the work he was about to
undertake implied; and whether he had any misgivings as to his own
fitness for it. He was only twenty-three years old, so perhaps, as youth
is sanguine, he entered upon it with a light heart, thinking—if he
paused to think—that he had strength of will sufficient to compensate
for defect of years and knowledge. ‘On vieillit vite sur les champs de
bataille.’ His previous training must have been in the main
professional; he could have gained at most only a glimpse of comparative
anatomy at the feet of Dr Barclay; the great writers on the subject,
Buffon, Daubenton, Cuvier, and the rest, must have been mere names to
him. Moreover, he was obliged, for lucre’s sake, to continue the
profession of a surgeon, and, though he gradually dropped it, he must,
for some time at least, have spent a good deal of time over it. Besides
this, he probably assisted Clift in the brief catalogue of the Hunterian
collections that appeared between 1833 and 1840. But, while thus
engaged, he found time for study. For three years he attempted no
original work; and when he did begin to write (his first paper is dated
9 November, 1830), it is evident that the previous years had been spent
in wise preparation. There is no trace of the novice in the papers that
followed each other in quick succession; they evince a complete mastery
of the subject from the historical, as well as from the anatomical,
side. The mere number of these communications, addressed principally to
the Zoological Society, is almost past belief. Before the end of 1855
more than 250 had appeared, many of which were of considerable length,
and enriched with elaborate drawings made by himself. But what is more
surprising still is the versatility displayed in their composition.
Nowadays a biologist is compelled to specialize. By ‘the custom of the
country,’ to borrow a legal phrase, he selects his own subject, and is
expected not to poach on that of his neighbours. But when Owen began to
work, these laws existed not, or at any rate not for him. The very
nature of his work obliged him to study in quick succession the most
diverse structures; and, as death does not accommodate itself to human
convenience, he could not tell from day to day what animals would be
sent from the Zoological Gardens to his dissecting-room. An excellent
bibliography of his works at the end of the second volume of the _Life_
enables us to trace his studies in detail. For our present purpose we
will only point out that between 1831 and 1835 he had written papers
(among many others) on the orang-outang, beaver, Thibet bear, gannet,
armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, cercopithecus, crocodile, toucan,
hornbill, pelican, flamingo, besides various Invertebrates.
While Owen was preparing himself for his serious attack on the catalogue
an event occurred which had an important influence on his scientific
development. Cuvier came to England to collect materials for his work on
fishes, and naturally visited the Hunterian collection. Owen has
preserved a singularly modest account of his introduction to the great
French naturalist:
‘In the year 1830 I made Cuvier’s personal acquaintance at the Museum of
the College of Surgeons, and was specially deputed to show and explain
to him such specimens as he wished to examine. There was no special
merit in my being thus deputed, the fact being that I was the only
person available who could speak French, and who had at the same time
some knowledge of the specimens. Cuvier kindly invited me to visit the
Jardin des Plantes in the following year’ (i. 49).
Accordingly, Owen spent the month of August 1831 in Paris. It has been
frequently stated, says his biographer, that Cuvier and his collection
‘made a great impression on Owen, and gave a direction to his
after-studies of fossil remains,’ a position which he contests on the
ground that neither Owen’s diary nor his letters describing the visit
warrant such a conclusion. We do not attach much importance to this
argument, but we feel certain that the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes,
from its unfortunate subdivision into departments widely separated
structurally from each other, could not have stimulated anybody in that
particular direction. That Cuvier was, to a very large extent, Owen’s
master in comparative anatomy is undeniable; he quotes him with respect,
not to say with reverence, in almost every page of his writings, and the
‘Prix Cuvier’ adjudged to him in 1857 probably gave him more pleasure
than all his other distinctions. Cuvier’s method, as set forth in _Les
Ossemens Fossiles_, of illustrating and explaining extinct animals by
comparison with recent was closely followed by his illustrious disciple.
But this principle might easily have been learnt—and in our judgment was
learnt—by a study of his works at home. On the other hand, Owen has
stated, in unequivocal terms, the direction in which Cuvier did exert a
special influence upon him. In his _Anatomy of Vertebrates_ (iii. 786),
published in 1868, he says:
‘At the close of my studies at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1831, I
returned strongly moved to lines of research bearing upon the then
prevailing phases of thought on some general biological questions.
‘The great Master in whose dissecting-rooms, as well as in the public
galleries of comparative anatomy, I was privileged to work, held that
“species were not permanent”; and taught this great and fruitful truth,
not doubtfully or hypothetically, but as a fact established inductively
on a wide and well-laid basis of observation.’
Further, Owen had the opportunity of listening to some of the debates
between Cuvier and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the question of how new
species may originate; and ‘on returning home,’ he adds, ‘I was guided
in all my work with the hope or endeavour to gain inductive ground for
conclusions on these great questions.’ Here, then, was the definite
educational result which Owen gained from his visit. It had, moreover,
another consequence. It made him known to the French naturalists, then
in the front rank of science. His scientific acquirements, coupled with
his agreeable manners and facility in speaking and writing French, made
him a _persona grata_ in Paris. In 1839 he was elected a corresponding
member of the Institute, and read more than one paper there in French.
We have already mentioned the long line of scientific papers which, from
1830 onwards, were the result of Owen’s indomitable energy. This series
was now to be interrupted for a moment by the famous _Memoir on the
Pearly Nautilus_, a quarto volume of sixty-eight pages, illustrated by
eight plates, drawn by himself. The shell of the nautilus, as most
persons know, has always been fairly common; but the animal which was
given to the Museum of the College of Surgeons in 1831 was, we believe,
the first, or nearly the first, which had ever reached this country, and
Owen was most fortunate in having the chance of describing such a
rarity. His essay, elaborate and exhaustive as it is, was dashed off in
less than a year. It was received with a general chorus of praise. Dr
Buckland spoke of it as ‘Mr Owen’s admirable work,’ and they were soon
in correspondence on the way in which the nautilus sinks and rises in
the water. Milne Edwards translated it into French, and Oken into
German. Nor has the contemporary verdict been reversed by that of
posterity. Mr Huxley says of the _Memoir_ that it
‘placed its author, at a bound, in the first rank of monographers. There
is nothing better in the _Mémoires sur les Mollusques_, I would even
venture to say nothing so good, were it not that Owen had Cuvier’s great
work for a model; certainly, in the sixty years that have elapsed since
the publication of this remarkable monograph it has not been excelled’
(ii. 306).
This essay seems to have given Owen a taste for the group to which the
nautilus belongs. At the conclusion of the _Memoir_ he proposed a new
arrangement of it, now generally accepted, which includes the fossil as
well as the recent forms; and, as occasion presented itself, he
described other species and genera. The merit of a memoir on the fossil
group called ‘belemnites,’ from the Oxford Clay, was the cause assigned
for the award to him of the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1846.
Between 1833 and 1840 the long-desired catalogue, in five quarto
volumes, made its appearance. Sir William Flower calls it ‘monumental’;
a singularly happy epithet, for it commemorates, as a monument should
do, alike the founder of the Museum and the industrious anatomist who
had minutely described the four thousand specimens of which the
‘physiological series’—or, as we should now say, the series of
organs—then consisted. Nor, though the arrangement is obsolete, can the
work itself be regarded as without value, even at the present time. It
has already served as a model for the catalogues of many other museums,
and has taken its place in the literature of the subject. It is, in
fact, an elaborate treatise on comparative anatomy from the point of
view of the modifications of special organs. The thirteen years spent
over it can hardly appear an excessively long time when we remember the
work involved, and also the fact that the college had from the first
recognized the duty of filling up gaps in the collection as occasion
offered. Many of the specimens recorded in this catalogue had been
prepared by Owen himself.